The Cornish Pasty
The Cornish pasty has the same legal protection as Champagne, and the law says it must be crimped on the side, never on top.
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Quick Facts
- What it is
- A D-shaped baked pastry of beef, potato, swede and onion, seasoned with salt and pepper
- Protected status
- Protected Geographical Indication since 2011, so it must be made in Cornwall
- Shape
- D-shaped, with the crimp running along the side
- Filling rule
- Raw ingredients, sealed in the pastry and cooked together
- Cornish slang
- Oggy
- Traditional eaters
- Cornish tin and copper miners, and farm workers
- Travelled to
- Michigan's Upper Peninsula, South Australia and Mexico with Cornish emigrants
- Annual celebration
- Cornish Pasty Week, held each February
The lunchbox that survived the mine
Pasties are recorded in medieval cooking and predate their association with mining lunches. They later became a staple food for Cornish miners and farm workers, and it is easy to see why. Tin and copper miners needed something that could survive a trip underground, and a sealed pastry parcel did the job. It stayed warm for hours and could be eaten with filthy hands. The popular story says the thick crimped edge doubled as a handle. Miners held the pasty by it and threw the crust away, so any mine dirt on their fingers never reached their mouths. Whether or not that's the whole truth, the sturdy pastry was built for rough treatment. A proper pasty can be dropped without shattering. The same pastry kept a whole meal in one hand. Farm workers took them to the fields, and fishing families took them to sea.
What goes in, and what must never go in
The recipe is stricter than most people expect. The filling is chunky beef, sliced potato, swede and onion, seasoned with salt and pepper. In Cornwall, swede is often called turnip. In Scotland, it is commonly called neep, especially when served as neeps and tatties. The filling goes in raw. The pasty is sealed and baked, so the meat and vegetables cook together in their own steam. That is why the gravy inside is so good, and why a precooked mix makes a lesser pasty. Carrots are the great controversy. Many Cornish cooks will tell you flatly that they don't belong, and the protected recipe doesn't include them.
Initials, oggies and the sweet end
Pasties were once made to order. A wife might mark her husband's with his initials, pressed into the pastry at one corner. If he couldn't finish it, he saved it for later, and there was no mix-up with a workmate's. The slang word for a pasty is oggy, which many people know from a football-terrace chant. There is also a long-told tale of pasties with a savoury filling at one end and something sweet, such as apple, at the other. It makes a good story for a lunchbreak, and some bakers still make a version of it for fun. Traditionally the pasty was eaten with the hands, straight from the paper bag, and often starting from the opposite end to the crimp.
Crimp on the side: the fight for legal protection
In 2011 the Cornish pasty won Protected Geographical Indication status, meaning only pasties made in Cornwall to the traditional recipe can carry the name. It joined an established geographical-indication scheme that already protected British foods such as Stilton, registered in 1996, and Cornish clotted cream, registered in 1998. The rules are specific. The shape is a D. The crimp is on the side, not along the top, which separates a Cornish pasty from many imitators. The pastry must be firm enough to hold the filling without splitting. The argument over where the pasty truly belongs has rumbled on across the Tamar, where Devon has long baked its own. But the legal label settled which ones are Cornish.
A pasty goes round the world
When Cornwall's mines declined in the nineteenth century, miners emigrated in huge numbers, and they took their lunch with them. In Michigan's Upper Peninsula the pasty became a local staple, and it is still sold there today. In South Australia, around Burra and the Copper Triangle, it is part of local heritage. In Mexico, in the old mining town of Real del Monte, the pasty is known as a paste. Back home, it has its own annual festival in Cornish Pasty Week each February. The Eden Project has hosted the World Pasty Championships, with Cornish pasty and open savoury categories for amateurs, professionals, companies and juniors. It grew up as a working lunch, and it still tastes best hot, in a paper bag, with the wind coming in off the sea.
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